15 minute refreshes - is Power BI the right tool?

[lordtopcat]

Hi,

Looking for some feedback or suggestions to whether Power BI is the right tool for my requriements. (Note, we already use PBI in our organization but not for this...)

We are an apple company which picks packs and ships around 5 million cartons of apples a year. We own and operate 3 packhouses and would like to display "live" (the business defines live as 15 minutes) data to the packhouse operators so they can monitor how their staff are performing. 

I initially thought about a streaming dataset to a dashboard, but then I really hate the dashboarding tool. It's very limiting and we have specific styles of how our Power BI reports are structured which does not fit in with using a dashboard. We also have a use case for a couple of custom visuals which are not supported in dashboards.

I then got excited about the new feature I read about in the October update about the automatic refreshing tiles - yay but only every 30 minutes on Pro or lower with Premium. We currently only have 20 PBI users, and we are in no way able to justify Power BI premium at a ridiculous $7k per month just for this project.

So, now I'm stumped and as much as I love Power BI reports, I'm really not sue if it's going to work for this business case. Can anyone please rescue me with a brilliant solution that I haven't thought about?

Cheers!

[Greg_Deckler]

I thought that there was a way to do this with Direct Query (so that it is "live" data and then display the report in a browser and use a tool/plug-in that refreshes the page every so often. 

[lordtopcat]

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@Greg_Deckler wrote:

I thought that there was a way to do this with Direct Query (so that it is "live" data and then display the report in a browser and use a tool/plug-in that refreshes the page every so often. 

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I did think about this by simply installing an automatic brower refresh plugin to refresh the page but wondered if this would be considered "tacky"? 

[Greg_Deckler]

Well, it probably wouldn't be considered "enterprise grade" but, as you stated, the enterprise grade option is $7K per month. (more like $6K if you get the right CSP).

Another potential option that I know @MattAllington was writing a blog series on at one point. Ah yes, here they are:

https://exceleratorbi.com.au/affordable-power-bi-premium-for-small-business-part-1/

https://exceleratorbi.com.au/affordable-power-bi-premium-for-small-business-part-2/